U.S. health info technology lags
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Dr. David Agus runs a hospital laboratory with the technological sophistication to find tiny markers in human blood that may one day tell doctors which treatment will best cure a patient's cancer, but he has hit a low-tech speed bump.
That's because the ultimate success of such personalized medicine projects depends on having thousands of people contribute health information to be digitally stored according to a standard format that makes it easy to share.
And that practice is not yet commonplace in the United States, or in many other industrialized nations.
"Electronic medical records could help us learn from every encounter with a patient," said Agus, an oncologist and director of the Spielberg Family Center for Applied Proteomics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
For now, many medical records remain in paper files that are easily lost, sometimes hard to read and less-than-convenient to locate, share and compare.
Patients in the United States, where healthcare is fragmented and Census figures indicate that nearly 45 million residents lacked health insurance in 2005, already pay the price.
Many avoidable costs are the result of a lack of information, and run the gamut from bills for unnecessarily repeated tests to potentially life-threatening care delays and medical errors, according to reports from the likes of research company Rand Corp. as well as physicians and patients on the ground.
Meanwhile, patient privacy issues, complaints about costs, competition among technology providers and doctors' apparent reluctance to embrace the system have left many medical records in the informational Stone Age. Continued...
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